The World of Coco Chanel: friends, fashion, fame Edmonde Charles-Roux Thames & Hudson, 383pp, £29.95 ISBN 0500512167

Gabrielle Chanel was barely entitled even to her rustic surname, being the illegitimate infant, born in 1883, of a peasant trader in workwear and underwear. She was dragged around market stalls, dumped in a religious orphanage and charity-educated for a counter job in a provincial drapery. She tried music hall as a way out of sewing her own wardrobe, but though she appeared different - she burned with the fierceness of the unprivileged - she had neither the voice nor the stagecraft required. She had a dramatic gift, but for a metier not yet invented: for the charades of enviability we recognise as celeb photography.

Who Chanel was, and who she would inspire women to become, is first clear in a sequence of shots dated 1910-12. She was by then the live-in mistress of a local nob, Etienne Balsan, but had too much dark energy to lounge languid, draped to immobility in haberdashery. The discipline of convent austerity had purged even the desire for excess. She adapted the tailor-made suit, shirt and boater hat of Charles Dana Gibson's turn-of-the-century cartoon dream-girl, but simplified and softened them. No corsets, no padding, no ratting of hair.

Her collar subsided into the school shape we call Peter Pan, and the French call Claudine, from Colette's naughty girl. In some snaps, Chanel is cross-dressed as a best man at a village wedding; or wears a towelling bathrobe; or - after she transferred the property of her body, businesslike, to the wealthy Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel - poses in outrageous jodhpurs. (Jean Renoir later had her design the costumes for his film La Regle du jeu.) The sun on the stable yard is nearly a century old, but Chanel seems to date from last Friday.

I had to interpret the images myself. The book has extended captions and a story of sorts by Edmonde Charles-Roux, once editor-in-chief of French Vogue and a journalist on Elle, the magazine wise enough to acknowledge Chanel when she made her last ferocious appearance as the spirit of modernity in 1954. But the words sound as if they have been translated by Babelfish.org - veritable becomes "veritable", and there are such risibilities as "by reason of a nasty bit of adultery", "Horrors!" and "interests he owned in the coalfields of Newcastle".

Anyway, the text is glossy mag - it takes history and social context off the rail to try them on briefly for effect and amusement. Chateaux are destroyed in the First World War mainly so that their owners can take refuge in Deauville to buy replacement ensembles from Chanel, by then set up by Capel as a modiste of revolutionary simplification. France undergoes ten pages of capitulation and occupation in the Second World War so that couturiere Chanel, who had taken a German officer lover, can be saved from postwar arrest when her former protector, the Duke of Westminster, asks Winston Churchill to intervene.

No mention of Chanel's attested anti-Semitism, or of the cocaine habit that sustained her Swiss exile and post-disgrace comeback; and only a flustered note on how she was forced to give in to her staff when they struck for basic employment rights in 1936. There are a few lines that catch what is evident in a 1962 frame of the old bat, fag in mouth, fitting an armhole. Some are by Colette: "the little black bull . . . works with ten fingers, nails, the edge of the hand, the palms . . . professional involvement of the body leaves her thin and hollow with fatigue". Some are by Chanel, set in a typeface she would have spat at, opposite a great pic of her ancient self reflected in the mirrors of her salon staircase. "Make the dress first, not the embellishment." And - vengeance on the orphanage - "Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends."

Eh bien. Look hard at the pictures and another narrative is visible. Gabrielle took an earthy surname and family familiarity with workwear and the despised jersey fabric of underwear, took the limited lengths of cloth available to the poor, took the cheap, new freedoms of sun on the face and hands shoved in pockets, and twice synthesised them into high fashion that unfettered women - once after the First World War and again in the 1950s in furious resistance to Christian Dior's New Look, which had reimposed the restriction of excess. Hardly a pleasant story - the revenge of the excluded never is - but so powerful that fashion is still repeating it.

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